Tag: Heron

Hepworth Willows

willows

Drawing on an iPad is ideal when you’re visiting the Hepworth as wet media aren’t allowed. I wanted to put into practice the tips that I’d picked up at the Procreate session at the Apple Store yesterday so I took a photograph as my starting point, not only as a guide to drawing as but also in order to extract a palette of autumnal colours from it.

willow and heron

The ragged shapes of willows didn’t give me much form to simplify so when I stopped for coffee I started again with a line drawing of the willow that I looked out at from the corner table by the window.

A heron stood motionless at the foot of the weir but didn’t seem to be having much luck in the middle of the foaming torrent. It evidently had an amazingly efficient heat exchange system to be able to tolerate the rush of water around its feet but it did eventually pause to lift its legs from the torrent and to briefly preen through its feathers.

Grebe, Gull and Heron

grebe and gulls

After recent heavy rain Newmillerdam is cloudy and khaki. A great-crested grebe pops up just yards from my table at the water’s edge at the Boathouse Cafe with a small silvery fish in its bill.

heron

Down by the outlet a heron is watching, waiting and stalking its prey, so intent on fishing that it allows me to rest my iPhone on the railings just 10 yards away from it to take this photograph.

heron
The M&S cafe this afternoon in Wakefield.

Heron Fishing

heron sketches

10.15 am, sunny, slight breeze: A heron is patiently watching and stalking in the shallows by an old coot’s nest near the outlet of Newmillerdam Lake. This is an immature bird; it has moulted out of its brown juvenile plumage but still has a shade of grey on its neck. It has yet to grow its crest into the breeding adult’s pigtails.

heron sketches

But it’s successful with its watch, bend neck and lightning-fast stab technique of fishing, catching two small fish in the space of 5 or 10 minutes. The second fish seems to me to be rather squat, and I wondered if it might be a bullhead.

Canada geese and tufted duck sketches

By the time that I move over to the Canada geese, gathering around someone feeding them near the main car park, my pen has stopped running freely, perhaps because there’s a bit of grease on my sketchbook page or the ink is running low. I bend down from the fishing platform and dabble the nib in the water. I like the transparent effect it gives to my drawing.

The tufted duck is so buoyant that it needs a little burst of power to push itself below the surface. It looks to me as if almost the whole duck jumps out of the water before diving sharply in headfirst, with legs ready to act as paddles to propel it deeper.

Spoonbill

bittern

On Friday at St Aidan’s we saw spoonbill, ruff, heron and bittern. A birdwatcher suggested that the adult spoonbills from the small colony at Fairburn Ings fly over to St Aidan’s to take a break from the juveniles.

As the ruff had a black bill, it was probably a female. We’re now into the autumn migration, so hopefully we’ll see a few more waders at the shallower ponds.

Designer Phragmites

Growing by watersides, reed canary-grass, Phalaris arundinacea, looks like a diminutive version of the common reed, Phragmites, and has been dubbed canal grass. At this time of year, some of the seedheads are flushed with purple, so it deserves its nickname of designer Phragmites.

Gipsywort

gipsywort
common blue

Growing alongside the Phalaris, gipsywort, Lycopus europaeus, which has been in herbal medicine and to produce a black dye.

There are dozens of dragonflies about and a few butterflies, including this common blue, taking a brief rest on the path.

Heron King

heron

You can see that I’ve struggled to draw on of my Dalesman nature diary illustrations in the same grungy style as my first Adobe Fresco drawing on my iPhone, but really that’s the point of it. This heron, which touched down on the greenhouse last January, was probably checking out our garden pond for the first frogs. It looks suitably regal and, for our frogs, dangerous, so I thought of the Aesop’s fable of the frogs who ask Zeus for a king but soon tire of log that he throws down for them and request a more impressive leader. They soon come regret their request.

Summer Green

sun on streamyellow flagIn the wood the beck now runs through a tunnel of fresh green foliage backlit by the sun. There are so many trees in full leaf that the valley seen from the Balk looks like the edge of a forest but a pair of mistle thrushes and a heron appreciate the acres of open space where grass has been cut, most likely for silage. The Strands has been cut too but the marshier sections have been left. Yellow flag is in showy bloom.

summer greenThe landscape seems so lush and green that it feels as if it’s overdoing it, like a Samuel Palmer rural idyll. It’s the way England appears when I’ve been away in the Mediterranean and become accustomed to the grey green of herbs and olive trees. I come back and the green seems heronalmost overwhelming.

Buttercups are at their best, some of the currently ungrazed pastures almost rivalling some of the buttercup meadows we saw in the Dales last.

The causey stone path has narrowed since we last walked along it as the mixed hedges the cow parsley close in on it.

Private Fishing

heronHorbury Bridge, May Day Bank Holiday Monday, 9.30 a.m.; a heron gets up from the edge of the old weir and flies downstream. The sober grey livery, black wing-tips and ‘wing light’ white patches on the leading edge of the wings give it the appearance of an RAF transport plane. The ‘black goggles’ eye-stripe makes it look determined. Will it fly over the bridge or under the arch?

cormoranttreeIt veers towards the arch on the Horbury side and disappears beneath. Then we realise why; a cormorant appears and flies off up the river. The pool below the weir is evidently private fishing.

Looking down on the action from such close quarters, we get a better view of a cormorant than any we had in Scarborough last week.

Heron and cormorant were birds from another world in my school days; spectacular  images in the Observer’s Book of Birds in romantic, rugged settings.

Heron and Wagtail

7.30 am; I SAW a Grey Heron flying unusually low over the roof tops and it was only 5 or 10 minutes later that I realised that it was flying so low because it was coming in to land at the edge of our garden pond; a juvenile, still in streaky grey plumage.

It soon flew off when it saw use looking at it. Hope it didn’t eat too many of our frogs and newts during its visit.

A minute later an equally infrequent visitor to our garden had taken its place by the pond; a Grey Wagtail bobbed and pecked around the pond edge.

Pigeons in the Wood

WOOD PIGEONS have been gathering in the treetops – about a hundred of them fly up over the wood on this cold and misty morning. Their regular foraging in the fields has been first snow-covered then frozen solid this week. We’ve got a book delivery to make today and we feel glad that we didn’t have to set out yesterday when we pass a car, which must have skidded on the ice, being towed out of a hedge. Casualty departments were 40 to 50% busier after the freezing rain.

After feeding on sunflower hearts around our bird feeders, the Pheasants often pause to nibble the leaves of broccoli in our cabbage patch as they walk down the garden path back towards the meadow and the wood.

A Heron, looking rather fed up, sits hunched on a perch for an hour or more on a branch of one of the Crack Willows by the stream. It appears to be undisturbed by any dog walkers who may be passing by below.

Voles, Moles and Unwelcome Guests

There are vole holes in the lawn and mole-hills in the flower border near the bird table but the burrow that I’m not so keen to see is one that leads from under a paving slab straight under the plastic compost bin. I can see that the chopped end of an onion has been dragged down from the bin. I want to recycle all our vegetable peelings but we can’t control which creatures are attracted to nibble them. I think that the answer is to re-think the way we compost anything that is potentially edible and relocate our plastic compost bins, currently behind the shed, to the main wooden compost bins at the end of the garden beyond the greenhouse. We never put any cooked food on the compost heap but then, being brought up in the Yorkshire tradition of thrift, we contribute virtually nothing to the estimated 7.2 million tons of food thrown out each year by households in the United Kingdom. It has been estimated that the average family with children throws out about £680 of food each year.

Ivy Berries

This evening two Wood Pigeons fly down to eat berries on the mass of Ivy that grows over our neighbour’s fence. A male Blackbird also tucks into this seasonal supply.

The River Ness

Mas leat an saoghal, is leat daoin’ an domhain

If the world is yours, the people of the world are yours too.

Gaelic proverb on the wall of the Cuach Coffee Shop, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
(A Cuach or quaich is a shallow, two-handed drinking cup, still used on Burns Night in Scotland)

DOES THIS PROVERB mean that if you go out into the world and become a part of it people will accept you and welcome you? It could just as easily be the motto of Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpine), “The Conqueror”, the ninth century King of the Scots who is reputed to have conquered the Picts.

Inverness, known as ‘the Capital of the Highlands’ is the only capital city that I know of where you can look down from a bridge and see the bottom of the river.

10.25 a.m.: A juvenile Herring Gull wheels down to the grassy bank on the far side of the river to peck and preen, oblivious of the people walking past yards away on the pavement at the other side of the wall. My sketches suggest that this is a juvenile that fledged last year because its back is beginning to turn grey (top left). In a first year bird, the back would be entirely mottled brown.

Some of the litter bins have posters on them asking you not to feed the gulls. The gulls are streetwise, hanging around on the bustling pedestrianised high street of the city, on the look out for scraps. They can recognise a bag of teacakes from a hundred yards away; a man and boy walk past, the man holding a white plastic bag of teacakes (for human, not gull, consumption) and soon three gulls and two crows appear.

These crows are black like the Carrion Crows we’re used to seeing in Yorkshire but we also see Hooded Crows which are grey with black head, breast-patch, wings and tail. Seeing this race of the crow always makes me feel that I’m in the Highlands. They’re also the crows that you’re likely to see in Europe to the south and east of the Alps. We see a number of hybrids of the two races.

An immature Grey Heron watches then strikes. I can’t see whether it actually caught a fish but I suspect that it did as it then wiped each side of its bill against the branch that it’s standing on.

Three Herring Gulls swooped down on the Heron and half-heartedly tried to dislodge it from its perch. They then took up look-out posts on the tops of buildings overlooking the river.